Copyright (c) 2015 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
A
BOX
Filled
with Darkness
By
R. Peterson
Jillian Everson heard
the doorbell ring just as she was putting a sudsy The Nut Job into the DVD player. Joey Mason, Kylie Wilkes and
Jennifer Lewis sat on the floor eating chocolate-chip cookies and playing with Legos
in front of the TV. Patrick Denning had just rubbed bubblegum in Tina Andrew’s
hair and then chased Bella into the
kitchen … Tina was screaming. Jill would have to use peanut butter and her old
toothbrush to get the gum out of the girl’s hair … and then catch the cat before the little monster started
swinging her by the tail again. She wondered if Beth Denning would care if she
held her four-year olds curly head under a sink filled with dirty dish water …
for say an hour. Probably not … that’s why the kid was such a puke. Jill settled
for wiping her hands on Patrick’s Batman
blanket … paybacks were a bitch.
The UPS driver was just
climbing back into his truck when Jill opened the door. She waved but he
ignored her … maybe if she’d worn that lacy
see-through mail-order blouse from Nasty
Dress. A cardboard box sat on the step. When Jill reached down to pick up the
package, a gust of wind blew off the combined address and postage label. Now
she didn’t know who the box came from. The white piece of paper sailed across
the street and fluttered over Bruce Pitman’s jet-boat cover. The box weight was
stamped just above the sealing tape: 4.19
lbs. “They don’t make glue like they used to,” Jill said as she carried the
package inside.
Maybe
that bitch Arlene Summers has sent me a couple of kilos of Anthrax,
Jill mused as she placed the box on the kitchen table and searched the cutlery drawers
for a knife to cut the tape. I’ll bet she
thinks I let her steal my no-good, worthless, bastard of an ex-husband Kevin on
purpose now that she realizes he lays around and texts other women on her phone
while she wipes tables at Spare-A-Dime. The image made Jill smile. She
pulled Patrick back by his hair and shoved him into the living room just as he
was about to grab Bella cowering behind a broom in the corner. She found the
knife. And he could have died in my arms
she mused as she watched Patrick shove Kylie Wilkes into a floor lamp and stomp
on a Cinderella Castle Jennifer Lewis
was building with Legos.
Jill sliced the tape
that sealed the box and opened the flaps no
one but the CDC has four pounds of anthrax, she reasoned. Jill was dumbfounded
for a moment, and her mind skipped to another part, like an old scratched
record. Her mouth fell open revealing four thousand, eight-hundred and forty dollars’
worth of cosmetic dental-work. A great
smile is everything. She was paying that leg-humping orthodontist Ed
Wheeler twenty dollars a week … maybe fifteen … if she wore the see-through blouse
the next time she went in to have her braces tightened.
The package appeared to
be empty of everything … including light! It was a box filled with darkness. Puzzled,
Jill carried the cardboard container into the hallway, where she could examine
it under brighter light and sat it in the middle of the floor. Patrick ran past
chasing Jennifer; she swatted his butt. She turned the open box every possible
angle but still could see only a dense swirling blackness.
Jill hesitantly reached
her hand inside and was amazed when she
could not touch the bottom? The outside
of the box was only four inches deep! Her curious arm disappeared to her
elbow … and then her shoulder, and still no bottom! Something felt cold. Jill
jerked her arm out, suddenly terrified. The sun freckles that always attack
twenty-two year old recently divorced women’s arms were gone, replaced by a milky-white
skin as smooth as Joey Mason’s baby sister’s bottom. Jill smiled stupidly at
first, and then gasped when she noticed the webbing between her splayed
fingers. “My God! I’ve got a frog hand,” she shrieked as she ran to the recently
installed kitchen sink to wash-off her horror.
Jill used a scrubbing
pad, but all she managed to do was splash water all over a rack of clean
dishes. Her hand was still webbed. She was drying her hand and examining the
thin pieces of skin stretched between her fingers when movement caught the
corner of her eye.
Joey Mason stood in the
hallway, peering into the box, holding a plastic Iron Man in his sticky fingers. The child dropped the toy into the
open box and bent to retrieve the action figure just as Patrick barged past
chasing the cat and bumped him. Jill sprinted toward the hallway and watched as
the child tumbled headfirst into the box. Her outstretched hands missed the
four-year old by inches, as his chubby legs disappeared into the darkness.
Jill danced in the
hallway, pulled her hair with both hands and screamed toward the ceiling.
“Enough is enough … I need to wake up now! Please God let me wake up!”
God was obviously on break … and Jill did not wake
up. She knelt beside the box, shoved a broom handle as far as she could reach
into the opening, and shouted into the darkness. “Joey are you down there? Are
you OK?” She put her ear next to the swirling blackness and listened … nothing.
Then she tried again. This time she thought she could hear voices from far
below. Joey was speaking to someone. “My daddy says he’ll buy me a bike when
I’m six … a pretty one.”
The voice that answered sounded rough like a
play-bucket being filled with gravel. “I know where there is a red bicycle
…come with me!”
“Don’t
you go with him,” Jill screamed, thrashing the broom inside the box. “Don’t you
dare go anywhere with him!” The broom was jerked violently from her hands.
“Do not come
between me and my toys,” the voice from below warned. “Or I’ll have to
make new dinner plans … to include you!”
-------2-------
Jill almost
dialed 911 with her shaking hand, then an image of a student nurse asking with
a sweet voice how she liked her last electro shock treatment pushed that option
out of her mind. She decided to call her next-door neighbor Erma Kite instead.
If anyone needed committed to State Hospital North that woman did. Erma
answered her cell phone on the fifth ring and sounded sloshed - no surprise,
even though it was just past two in the afternoon. Jill asked her to come over
right away. “Why what’s up?” Jill decided to tell the truth; that last resort
that works on mothers and drunks.
“I’ve lost one of the children,”
Jill told her.
“How the #%@& did you do that?”
Erma sounded like she was chewing ice cubes.
“He fell into a cardboard box and I
can’t get him out.”
“Helpless aren’t you,” Erma sighed.
“I’ll be right over.”
Jill
had barely hung up the phone when the front door burst open. Erma staggered into
the hallway; she clutched a water splashed cell phone in one hand, and made
curious swipes against thin air, in an attempt to keep her balance.
“That was fast.”
“I was outside watering my roses.”
“You don’t have any roses.”
“Then your roses, I got soaked with
that %#@& hose doing something.”
“I need your help bad Erms. Something awful is happening. I
feel like I woke up in an episode of Twilight Zone.” Jill ushered her toward
the innocuous looking cardboard box. “You haven’t been drinking have you?”
“No way,” Erma told her. “It’s only
six in the morning. I don’t have my first drink until after lunch.” Erma’s foot,
off balance because of a substance abuse monitoring band around her ankle, slid
on part of a Lego castle which was scattered across the vinyl floor and she fell,
almost tumbling into the box. Jill had to pull her back. “Joey fell in there?”
Erma leaned forward and stared at the swirling blackness. “He’s too little.”
“The box is too little,” Jill was pulling her hair again. “That’s why
this is so impossible. I know he’s somewhere inside; I saw him fall in. Also
I’ve heard his voice. There is someone else in there too … someone not nice.
I’ve heard them talking.”
Erma
was on her knees. Her hand was inches from the darkness, when Jill stopped her.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you!”
“Why not?”
“This is why!” Jill held up her
right arm and made a swimming motion with her fingers. “The black smoke stuff
that’s in the box changes you.” Erma stared at Jill and then shook her head.
She began uncoiling the cord on a vacuum cleaner. Jill stared at her fingers.
Her hand had returned to normal, complete with tiny sun freckles.
“The first thing we’re gonna do is
suck out all that smoke,” Erma said as she connected two extension tubes onto
the vacuum’s hose and poked it into the box. Her eyes grew large when she
realized she couldn’t touch the bottom by swinging the extensions around. ‘It’s
got you hallucinating.” Erma assured Jill as she flipped on the switch to the
vacuum. “What a shame, sending someone a box of high quality weed that’s already burning.”
Both
extensions and Erma’s arm disappeared into the box all the way up to her
shoulder. Before she could say WTF? The
hose was jerked violently out of her hand. A second later the vacuum cleaner
itself slid across the floor and banged Erma in the side. Jill pulled her away
from the box and they huddled against the wall. The twenty foot cord grew
tight, pulled loose from the wall outlet and followed the vacuum cleaner into
the box like a slithering snake. The swirling blackness remained.
Erma
broke loose from Jill’s grip and lunged toward the box. “You give that vacuum
and the boy back,” she threatened. “Don’t make me come down there!”
Laughter
could be heard from deep inside the box, like a compactor in a recycling center
crushing aluminum cans. “If you want the boy … you come and get him!”
“Do
you still have Kevin’s extension ladder in your garage?” Erma asked. “The first
thing we got to know is how deep this thing is.”
“Watch the kids … and don’t let them
anywhere near the box,” Jill told her. “I’ll get it.”
Patrick
Denning ran past chasing the cat. Erma grabbed him by his Spiderman shirt, opened
the door to the same closet that she’d taken the vacuum from, and shoved the squirming
brat inside. She held the door closed with her foot while he wailed and beat on
the inside of the closet with his tiny fists. Erma paid no attention. Instead,
she stared at her right hand, the one she’d shoved inside the shipping box.
Thin strips of skin stretched between each finger. “Aren’t I the lucky duck,”
she said.
-------3-------
Jill
lowered her ex-husbands twelve-foot aluminum extension ladder into the black
swirling rectangle. It barely fit between the box’s edges. Just as she began to
fear that it wouldn’t be long enough, a tremor ran through her arm as the
ladder struck bottom, with four rungs sticking out the top. “You want me to go
down?” Erma swayed as she leaned against the closet door obviously unable to
stand, let alone climb down a ladder.
“I’ll do it,” Jill told her. “You
just make sure another child doesn’t fall in.” But before she descended into
the darkness she grabbed a baseball bat also swiped from the garage. Kevin used
to coach a Little League team before he found out it was more fun to strike-out
with women. “I don’t know what’s down there with Joey,” Jill told Erma. “But I’ll
bash its head in, if it don’t give me back that little boy!”
“And the vacuum,” Erma told her. “Don’t
let that bugger keep the vacuum.”
Jill
was almost all the way inside the box when she felt the ladder slip. “Erma,
help me!”
Her
best friend was still holding the closet door closed with Patrick inside. Erma stretched
out both hands but the ladder slid all the way into the box taking Jill with
it.
A
mass of gray fur with tiny black eyes pulled the bottom of the ladder off a
ledge.
“Jill, are you OK?” Erma forgot
about the closet and the child inside, and staggered over to the box, where she
fell on her knees and peered into the dark opening.
Jill
had flunked Math in high school, and hadn't even heard of the laws of physics.
But even she knew that it was impossible for something to be larger on the
inside than it was on the outside. Impossible or not, she stood on a middle
rung of the ladder and clutched its sides, watching as a large rodent brushed
past her leading Joey into an even deeper darkness. “No!” she screamed. The
creature turned revealing a segmented fleshy tail that wound around its midsection
like a snake. A long tongue licked Joey’s arm. “Mmmm tastes like pork,”
the rat hissed. It made a vertical sweeping gesture with one clawed hand. Jill and
the ladder both tumbled. The bat fell from her hand. She splashed into a cool
liquid that stung her eyes and watched the aluminum ladder sink. She couldn’t
touch bottom and began to swim. “I’m alright,” Jill yelled to the tiny light
above. “But there’s some kind of stinky water down here. Better take a foam
cushion off the couch and toss it down just in case I can’t find someplace to
stand.” Jill watched a light flicker in the distance. The rodent and Joey stood
silhouetted in a doorway, then the door banged closed and there was only
darkness.
-------4-------
Erma
jerked the closet door open and dragged Patrick along by his ear as she hurried
into the living room. Kylie Wilkes and Jennifer Lewis were asleep on the floor
in front of the TV. Tina Andrews was still watching an animated video. Both
cushions on Jill’s couch were doubles with zippers on both ends. Erma couldn’t
hold onto Patrick and take out the foam pieces. She reached up and unfastened a
macramé plant hanger from the ceiling and then hung Patrick on the hook by his
shirt collar. Patrick began to scream like a banshee. Erma retrieved a roll of
duct-tape from the kitchen drawer and put a piece across the boy’s mouth. “Damn!
That’s so much better,” she said. She almost tripped on Bella and opened the
door to let the cat outside.
Erma
stumbled back to the box and forced the square of foam through the opening. “Are
you still there?” she called. There was no answer.
-------5-------
Jill swam toward what
looked like light. Her hands brushed against something that felt smooth like
glass. She paddled around looking for an edge and found herself in a round
room. Jill was getting tired and was relieved when she discovered she could
stand on her tip toes. Jill placed her hands and then her face against the
glass. “If this is some kind of window,” she muttered. “I wonder what’s on the
other side.” The glass appeared to be thick and acted like a lens. Jill had to
move closer then adjust the distance to see clearly. She could just make out Bruce
Pitman’s covered boat across the street. When she moved farther along the
curved surface she could see the small arborvitae shrug that grew next to her
front step. It was as big as a tree. Just then a large object moved past the
glass. A cat as big as an elephant! Not just any cat … Bella! Jill reached one
finger into the liquid she was immersed in and tasted it. “Whiskey! Not just
any old whiskey either. It was Seagram's Seven Crown, the brand Erma drank. Her
next door neighbor had left an unfinished bottle on her step and Jill was
swimming in it.
-------6-------
Erma paced around the
open box in the center of the hallway. She thought about calling the police,
but the light on the GPS ankle monitor she was wearing was already yellow. Another
ten feet and the light would turn red, send a signal and the cops would arrest
her for breaking probation. By court order she was not supposed to leave her own
yard. The first thing the sheriff would do would be to haul her back to county
lock-up … this time for six months. All this over a stupid DUI. Erma remembered
the bottle she’d left on the front step. Jill didn’t like her drinking in her
house, but damn it … Jill was missing.
-------7-------
Jill felt the slick
surface she stood on suddenly go from horizontal to almost vertical. She slipped
and her head splashed under the blended whiskey. Once again she was swimming.
Light distorted images from inside the bottle like a carnival funhouse as she went
rushing down the inside of the bottle’s neck. The neighbor’s petunias grew
large, then small. Bruce Pitman’s jet-boat spun in his driveway then appeared
to launch in the sky like a rocket. Erma Thomas’s dental bridgework lined the
top and bottom of a cave entrance into which the liquid was pouring. Jill
screamed.
-------8-------
Erma looked slyly up
and down the empty street before she lifted the bottle to her lips. Something
brushed her tooth. The first thing she thought of was a grasshopper … screaming
her name. She could see something the size of a dark insect thrashing an inch
from her tongue. Erma dropped the bottle of Seagram's Seven Crown and it
shattered on the concrete step. “I’m losing my mind,” she shrieked. Two
children playing with a bounding dog, two houses down, stared in her direction
just before they dashed toward their own front door. “See … your mother isn’t
the only one.” Erma mumbled as she went back inside Jill’s house to get a broom
and dustpan.
-------9-------
Jill staggered to her
feet after the explosion. It had to be a miracle that she wasn’t cut by the
shattered glass blowing outward in all directions. Translucent bubbles as big as
basketballs to her but that she knew would be invisible to her now much larger
best friend clustered together as they formed alcohol vapors evaporating into
the atmosphere. Straw broom bristles as big as tree trunks suddenly swept her
off her feet and into a plastic dust pan. Seconds later she felt the pan begin
to tip and Erma dumped the contents into the bin under the kitchen sink. Jill
had just enough time to jump toward the edge of the receptacle and grasp the
edge of a plastic liner as the soggy glass fragments rattled into the bottom of
the garbage can. The plastic material was hard to hang on to and Jill slid
almost to the floor, then let go and tumbled onto a cluttered baseboard next to
a towering bottle of Dawn dishwashing
detergent, a monster sized package of d-CON
rat poison and an equally large can of Comet
cleanser. She was knocked unconscious. When she woke minutes later, her
arms and legs were tied with string now as big as thick rope. The rodent
creature stood holding Joey’s in the back of the cabinet just behind a barn-sized
box of green scrubbing pads and a bottle of Old English furniture polish. Before
she could scream, she heard footsteps. One of Erma’s shoes kicked the under-the-sink-door
closed and Jill was once again plunged into darkness. Jill sat on the baseboard
and began to cry.
-------10-------
Erma unhooked Patrick
from the ceiling and led him into the kitchen where she watched his guzzle
three large glasses of chocolate milk. Five minutes later he yawned and she carried
him into the living room. She spread his Batman blanket over him and two other
children. Erma decided to lie down on the couch and take a nap of her own. She purposely
avoided looking into the hallway. Surely Jill had only driven to the market to
buy more milk and would be back soon. Drinking alcohol caused nightmares and
not drinking made them more vivid. There was no strange box in the hallway
filled with darkness. Erma was almost sure … a little sleep and she would be
certain. The overstuffed couch wrapped around her like a giant Teddy Bear …
minutes later she was asleep. The only sounds inside the house on Cloverdale’s Galbraith
Street were the ticking of a clock and the snores of a woman dreaming her way
to sobriety.
-------11-------
Tiny beams of light
filtered from a badly drilled facet opening that a sloppy workman had recently
gouged in the vinyl countertop. Jill began to see shapes appear in the
darkness. Unblinking vermin eyes drew closer. The rodent appeared dragging an unconscious
Joey. “Your
flesh belongs to me now, and I like it roasted.”
The creature pointed at Jill. “But first I want you to watch as I feast on your young
charge.”
“Who are you?” Jill
gasped.
“I’m everything that you are afraid of
and more,” the rat snarled as he dropped Joey’s leg on a clump
of sawdust and lit a stick-match again a striker on the side of a Blue Diamond box,
holding it above his hairy head like a fiery torch. The rodent’s voice was like
a rusty key turning in a corroded lock. “I am the shadow that vanished when you
turn quickly. I am a sound in the night that you can’t explain. I am rent that
comes due the same time a pantry runs empty. I am broken bones and shattered
hearts. I am household repairs that replace a new dress and shoes. I am the toy
you lost that turns up broken. I am a laugh that escapes at a funeral. I am the
tire-tracks on a pet squashed in the street. I am a disease that picks children
for a team.” The rat lit a candle stuck to a small
plate that Jill kept in case of electrical outages. His black eyes glistened. “But most of
all … I am ravenous.” The rat danced toward joey.
“Get away from him!”
Jill thundered. The string that bound her began to break. She watched the flame
flicker … she took a deep breath and blew with all her might. Jill watched the
rodent turn and lunge for her across the cluttered baseboard just before the
match went out.
-------12-------
Erma woke up when she heard
the mouse trap snap under the sink
and a tiny thumping sound. “Bella, dinner’s ready,” Erma said as she rose from
the couch and stretched. The rodent was still wiggling under the steel bar and
snap spring when Erma lifted it in the air and carried it onto the front porch.
She didn’t see the two tiny figures, one dragging the other jump onto the
kitchen floor from under the open sink cabinet.
At the same time Jill’s
cat began to eat and swallow the rodent, Jill and Joey began to grow. By the
time Erma returned to the kitchen the two stood in front of the now taped and
closed shipping box. “I’m never drinking again. I had the most awful nightmare,”
Erma said.
“We all did,” Jill told
her. “They turned and stared at the box now sealed with fresh tape. A pre-paid
shipping label was stuck just about top center. Jill and Erma wanted nothing more
than to be rid of the package. Jill reached out to clasp Erma's hand.
Unsteadily, they walked towards the box. Together they knelt and looked to see
who the horrible box was addressed to. They both gasped.
THE END?
